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X hires Nikita Bier, the serial entrepreneur who was behind polling startup TBH and teen-focused social network Gas, as its new head of product (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

The US takes down a North Korean operation that, from 2021 to 2024, impersonated 80+ people to get remote jobs at 100+ US firms, using "laptop farms" in the US (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

Winnipeg-based Conquest Planning, which uses AI to help financial advisors and other clients make decisions, raised an $80M Series B led by Goldman Sachs (Jon Fingas/BetaKit)

Memo: OpenAI's Mark Chen responds to Meta offers, says it feels like "someone has broken into our home and stolen something" and OpenAI is "recalibrating comp" (Zoë Schiffer/Wired)

The F1 movie gives Apple its first box office hit, opening to $144M worldwide and $55.6M in the US; it was pushed on Apple Music, Podcasts, Fitness+, and Wallet (Anthony D'Alessandro/Deadline)

Elon Musk calls the Senate tax bill "utterly insane" as it raises taxes on nuclear and geothermal energy and battery storage, which are crucial for AI training (Noah Smith/Noahpinion)

[Thread] Cluely unveils a desktop AI assistant that it says can help users cheat on meetings, sales, lectures, interviews, learning new software, and more (Roy/@im_roy_lee)

As Reddit turns 20, a look at its AI efforts, including the Reddit Answers chatbot, while it battles unauthorized scraping of user data for AI training (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

Hands-on with seven coding agents tasked with building a website: Claude Code performed best, OpenAI's Codex lacked polish, and Replit failed to build the site (Timothy B. Lee/Understanding AI)

Meta and Anthropic prevailed in copyright suits against them, but the rulings have major caveats and don't address when AI output might infringe copyright (Adi Robertson/The Verge)

Sources: Meta is looking to raise $3B in equity and $26B in debt, from private capital firms, including Apollo Global and KKR, to fund its data center build out (Financial Times)

UK retailers are building an arsenal of anti-theft tech powered by AI, computer vision, and facial recognition, as organized crime fuels a shoplifting epidemic (Laura Onita/Financial Times)

Trump says the US is "terminating all discussions on trade with Canada" in response to Canada's decision to impose a digital services tax on US tech firms (Kevin Breuninger/CNBC)

Trump's tax bill expands Qualified Small Business Stock benefits for VCs, founders, startup staff, including increasing maximum tax-free gains from $10M to $15M (Ben Steverman/Bloomberg)

Sources: Senate Parliamentarian raised concerns that the tax bill's ban on states from enforcing AI regulations may violate Senate rules, advising a rewrite (Bloomberg)

Internal emails: ICE is using Mobile Fortify, an app that uses facial recognition and fingerprint scanning via phone cameras to identify people in the field (Joseph Cox/404 Media)

Micron reports Q3 revenue up 37% YoY to $9.3B, vs. $8.85B est., forecasts Q4 revenue above estimates, and says it's on track for record revenue this fiscal year (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Getty Images drops its primary claims of copyright infringement against Stability AI in UK court but continues to pursue other claims and a separate US lawsuit (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

WhatsApp launches optional Meta AI-generated summaries of unread messages in the US; Meta can't read the messages and summaries are hidden from other chat users (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Microsoft makes Windows 10's extended security updates free for an extra year for users who sync PC settings via a Microsoft Account and the Windows Backup app (Zac Bowden/Windows Central)

Chrome for Android is rolling out a feature that lets users move the address bar to the bottom of the screen, after it launched for iOS users in 2023 (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Demand is growing for expensive personalized dating services that vet members before first dates; Tinder's paid users have fallen for two years amid app fatigue (Bloomberg)

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab reportedly raising $2B would be the largest seed round ever, far surpassing Yuga Labs' $450M seed round in 2022 (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News)

Filing: Elon Musk's lawyers say he "does not use a computer" after OpenAI accused Musk of not complying with the discovery process in his lawsuit against OpenAI (Wired)

How AI is enabling a "botscaling" era in Silicon Valley, where companies achieve high revenue per employee with minimal headcount (Walter Frick/Bloomberg)

A US judge let an age-discrimination claim, focused on an application-screening algorithm, proceed as a collective action against HR software company Workday (Lauren Weber/Wall Street Journal)